Monday, March 31, 2008

After I got home with Hybridzilla last night, I sprayed the drivetrain off with my water bottle and wiped it dry. I let it sit to finish drying a bit. Before I went to bed, I re-lubed the chain, brought it inside, and turned in for the night. This was around 10:30 or so.

At about 11:45, I was sound asleep, and was awakened with BANG!!!! HISSSSSSSSSSSSSssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss... Followed by a ton of clatter, banging, and god knows what else. I figured my bike's tire had popped and the bike itself may have fallen over. The bike was still upright, but the noise had to have awakened the dead.

It turns out that the cats have a certain aversion to loud hissing noises. My cats don't even like this hiss of the floor pump as I pull it off the stem after topping off my tires, so this noise scared the hell out of them both. As it turns out, my youngest cat was asleep on one of those 5' tall cat posts with a nest at the top. She launched from it with enough force to knock it over, then proceeded to jump up on the counter in the kitchen and knock almost everything over in an attempt to find some kind of shelter from whatever doom she feared would come of the failed bike tire. This made a considerable mess (okay, only spilled water from a knocked-over drinking container but still).

So, I spent the next 30 minutes cleaning up messes and putting a new tube in Hybridzilla. The Schrader valve actually had a blowout at the base of the stem. I'd never seen that before. This is an old tube with 5 patches on it (including 3 park tool glueless) that had been filled, refilled, and moved between rims more times than I could count. There's no patching a stem, though. It had a good life and served me well. Remember what I had said about how much of a pain it is to work on these SlickCity tires? Well I had to do it all over again, this time using my only spare 26" tube. This is a new one I bought about a year ago that's never been used. I've had really good luck with all of my knobby tires, as I've never, ever flatted with knobbies. The SlickCity tires do pick up goat-heads and glass and they're getting kind of thin, hence the number of patches in the one tube.

My heart was still pounding and adrenaline still pumping when I lay back down to go to bed again. It took a while to calm down and fall asleep. I'd pay for that this morning. My alarm went off at 5:00 but I turned it off and passed out again. Fortunately, my wife woke me up with 15 minutes to get ready and out the door. Without time for breakfast, I grabbed a few bananas and packed them with my clothes.

I was greeted this morning with really nice temperatures, but crazy humidity in combination with rainwater already on the road. To match the humidity, wind out of the south was at a static 25 MPH with gusts well into the 30's. Not fun at all. Combined with a start that was 5 minutes behind schedule, I barely made it to the bus stop on time.

I needed the coffee this morning, badly. Lorin, JR and I talked bike shop and discussed the various people who were "admiring" our bikes.

Okay, this is NOT random tunage. This is an album that's about 2 years old that I just found out about, and it's awesome. Binary Finary, about a decade ago, put out a track called 1998. It was awesome and got remixed into oblivion (and subsequently named 1999, 2000, etc), and many of those remixes were usually good. They were included on many Electronic music compilations. As such, that's all they ever did, was that one song and a few remixes of it... or so we thought. This album has a bunch of other stuff from them. It's basically the missing album I was looking forward to buying a decade ago. And now I have it.

I hope your wife is able to keep her job. I lost mine Friday, so I probably won't be meeting you guys downtown any more. On the other hand, my Monday nights are free and that ride you write about that leaves from the Mexican restaurant sounds like fun.

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